Hate speech isn't free, no matter who speaks it

August 12, 2011

In a forum published in the Aug. 3 Sun Sentinel, Michael Kenny went off on a revealing rant congratulating the GLBT Democratic Caucus for making the Wilton Manors Business Association cave to its demands that U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Plantation, be disinvited from a speaking engagement (or face a boycott) while criticizing the Editorial Board of the Sun Sentinel for not joining in on the self-serving group applause for stifling the speech of someone they disagree with.

Of course, Kenny is apparently an expert on the First Amendment, pronouncing that "it's not a question of viewpoint or speech" but rather "facts versus rhetoric."

Setting himself up as the absolute arbiter of who gets to speak in South Florida, he provided a chilling rationalization for muzzling the opinions or beliefs of a congressman. West's unforgivable heresy is to believe in the traditional marriage between a man and woman and to have opposed the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."

In the meantime, Kenny engaged in an ad hominem comparison of West to Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke as a justification for denying the congressman the right to speak at a forum to which he had been invited. He then descended into cliched attacks on West as "an actual purveyor of prejudice" whose "crazy, bigoted, fact-free hate speech" deserves to be quarantined because "all opinions are not equal, valid or worthy of serious consideration."

So much for free speech and the First Amendment. Kenny's own rhetoric is a telling example of projection, since it's filled with tendentious smears and the very bigoted hate speech that he supposedly condemns. There's a kind of creepy fascism when tolerance and diversity apply only to the people you agree with and when intolerance of anyone who deviates from your ideological orthodoxy becomes the rhetorical equivalent of, if not "off with his head," then "off with his speech."